The Worst Person in the World

The Worst Person in the World is a masterpiece. It achieves something extremely difficult: it does not merely tell a story, but places us completely inside the minds and lives of its characters. When it ends, it does not feel as though we have watched them from a distance. We seem to have lived beside them, made their decisions, felt their doubts and carried away part of everything that happened.

Julie is approaching thirty without fully knowing who she wants to be. She changes her studies, career, interests and relationships because every new possibility appears capable of bringing her closer to a more authentic version of herself. It is not that she wants nothing. She wants many different things and fears choosing one because every choice means abandoning all the others.

It would be very easy to judge her. Julie hurts people who love her, follows her impulses and confuses the need to feel alive with the certainty that she is making the right decision. Yet the film never condemns or excuses her. It observes her with extraordinary intimacy and allows us to understand even the choices we cannot defend.

Renate Reinsve is astonishing. She does not seem to be playing Julie so much as living inside her. She can express enthusiasm, selfishness, desire, fear, guilt and tenderness without making the transitions visible. Her face communicates thoughts that the screenplay never needs to explain. It is a performance filled with life and contradiction.

Aksel is a wonderful character. He is older than Julie, appears to understand himself more clearly and has built a much more defined life. Yet that confidence also hides his own fears. He knows that time is passing, that he belongs to a different generation and that he may be asking Julie for something she is not yet ready to give.

I saw a great deal of myself in him: in the way he loves, in his desire to share what he has learned and in his fear that the distance between two stages of life may eventually matter more than the connection between two people. Aksel loves Julie, but he also understands that loving someone does not mean being able to keep them.

Their relationship is beautiful because the film never presents it as a simple mistake. They genuinely love one another. They make each other happy, understand one another and share an intimacy that does not disappear when the relationship ends. But loving someone and living at the same point in life are different things, and the film communicates this without making either of them the villain.

Then Eivind appears, representing another possibility. With him there is lightness, novelty and the feeling of beginning again without the weight of earlier expectations. The famous sequence in which the world seems to stop while Julie crosses the city towards him is beautiful. It captures the feeling that, when we desire something intensely enough, everything else can temporarily cease to exist.

But the film knows that no choice permanently resolves who we are. Julie changes relationships while carrying the same uncertainties with her. No other person can organize our life from the outside. Love can accompany, transform or destroy us, but it cannot answer every question on our behalf.

The chapter structure is perfect. Each section captures a moment, discovery or wound. Life does not progress here like a perfectly constructed story, but as we remember it: through scenes that seemed small at the time and later explain everything.

There are very funny moments, painfully uncomfortable ones and others of overwhelming sadness. Joachim Trier moves between tones without making the film feel fragmented. Comedy does not erase pain, and tragedy never turns it into something solemn. They coexist because that is also how life works.

Then the story of Aksel gives the film an even greater depth. What initially seemed to be a story about romantic uncertainty and fear of commitment becomes a reflection on time, loss and all the lives we will never live.

His final conversations with Julie are devastating. They need no grand declarations or music telling us how to feel. It is enough to watch two people who still love one another and understand certain things too late. The life they might have shared no longer exists, but it cannot be erased either.

At that point, the film is no longer only Julie’s story. It is also Aksel’s: the story of someone watching the world he knew continue without him, remembering objects, films, music and places that are slowly losing their meaning to everyone else. It becomes impossible not to think of ourselves, of what we leave behind and of the people with whom we might have been happy in another life.

The title is perfect because Julie is not the worst person in the world. She is someone trying to live without knowing the correct way to do it. She makes mistakes, causes pain, runs away, returns and continues growing. Like almost everyone.

The Worst Person in the World is about love, but also age, motherhood, identity, nostalgia, the fear of choosing and the time that escapes us without our being able to stop it. It offers no easy endings, moral punishments or perfectly explained lessons.

It is the kind of film that can change how you see your own relationships and past decisions. A story that finishes but continues turning over in your mind long afterwards.

A masterpiece: beautiful, painful and absolutely unforgettable.